Webinar: Multiply Return On Facebook Investment

Facebook’s mission to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected has provided marketers way more access as compared to any other social network in the world.

A very informative webinar session with Preetham Venkky on how to do an effective Facebook marketing, and keeping in mind the latest updates on Facebook platform what kind of strategy will help in multiplying return on Facebook investment.

Some questions discussed during the webinar were:

Q. In today’s time, how much importance are organisations giving to creating and promoting a Facebook page as compared to doing other stuffs like running an ad on Facebook?

A. To this Preetham answered, recruitment of fans on Facebook is a constant thing that continues. Nobody can ever say that I have got all my customers on Facebook. What Facebook gives through a Facebook page is something really important, which is addressability.

Let us look at the purchase funnel. Whenever you run a TV commercial or a print campaign, it just builds awareness. You haven’t moved users to a consideration cycle at all. But when you recruit them as fans on Facebook page, all of those fans are now on a consideration cycle. That means you get better conversion on to the purchase funnel when it comes to final purchase. Recruitment has to continue in any case. There isn’t a fixed ratio on how much I need to spend on recruitment. What matters is that are you getting the most out of your fans right now. There is threshold for scalability. Get that threshold first. Then start working with your content strategy and then start scaling up the rest of the recruitment.

Q. Are there some industry standards for conversion that one is looking at especially in terms of the organic traffic that one can get out of Facebook?

A. First let’s take the example of a small business of food and restaurant. They have a single store and their objective is to drive customers to come in. The conversion metrics they will be measuring is the average cost of acquisition of a customer. That is a primary benchmark.

Industry benchmark can vary from territory to territory. For instance, the benchmark for Bombay will be different from that of Pune because of various factors such as the number of people in the two cities, the cosmopolitan nature of Bombay, etc. There isn’t any specific industry measure.

You need to fix a value for your conversion and see if Facebook as a platform is able to get you that value. If it is not, then don’t be on the platform.

Q. How do you ascertain that the results you obtain are on account of your Facebook efforts?

A. One thing is that you can directly measure the digital objectives. Anything that is online can be easily tracked. You can know the traffic that is coming from Facebook.

One of the biggest challenges that most people face is when it comes to brand based awareness and trust based awareness. How do I track a user who is seeing my ad or who is a Facebook fan of mine? How do I track that he has walked into the store? That is a little tricky. One way to do that is to do a dipstick analysis of people who are walking into the store by asking them if they are a Facebook fan, etc.

The second and more interesting way is to do time parting. It means for instance, run your marketing strategy for three months in a row and add the Facebook component in the fourth month and then see what the change is. This is how you can have some kind of measurability of what’s happening.

Attribution is obviously a complex task but it is definitely possible. You just need to strategise it properly.

To check some more questions discussed during the webinar you can go on the following link: